Memories
by Kurissyma san Tybalt
Summary: Angela catches Maura crying over a scrapbook in the wake of her fight with Jane (end of season 2) and isn't surprised to learn that there was more to Maura's relationship with her daughter than there seemed.


If Angela thought her heart had broken when Jane forced her to choose between her and Maura, she relinquished the notion the moment she walked into Maura's living room again. Because surely _this_ was true heartbreak: coming back to pick up her memory foam pillow for Jane's hellishly uncomfortable couch and finding Maura in tears on the floor.

All of Angela's motherly resolve to take care of Jane's needs first melted away and she found herself sinking to the floor beside the doctor who had become her second daughter over the past several years. "Oh, baby, shh…" she soothed her. "Maura, it's okay."

"P-please, don't," Maura gasped, wiping her eyes quickly before slamming shutting the book she'd had open in from of her. "I don't like to be hugged-"

"-when you're very upset," Angela finished. "I know, I know. You and Jane are the same like that… Except when it comes to each other."

This only prompted another wave of tears from Maura, who still would not accept the hug Angela was desperate to give her. "Y-you shouldn't be here. You should be worrying about Jane, not me."

"I'm a mother," Angela replied determinedly. "I have an _endless_ capacity for worry - way more than enough to encompass both of my girls, no matter how headstrong they're being. What are you looking at here, sweetie?"

Maura protested half-heartedly as Angela picked her scrapbook off the living room floor. "It's nothing. It's just- just some old things…" It was pointless - Angela was already opening up to a page around the middle of the book.

A photo booth strip from a BPD Christmas party was stuck next to a pink paper parasol Maura had saved from a drink and pressed like a flower - she'd penned the occasion and the date in beside it. Beneath both was a photograph of Jane and Frost, which a pink-cheeked and broad-grinned Maura had cheekily snuck into the background of. To the right: another photo - this one of Maura herself with Jane hanging off her shoulder, talking into her ear. Both had somehow acquired Santa hats since the previous photo was taken and the white pom pom on the end of Maura's was pressed cutely against Jane's nose. Angela turned one page, then another, and another, and Maura wasn't the only one crying now.

A photo Frankie had taken of himself, Jane, and Maura in the back of his police cruiser; two wristbands from an amusement park - Jane had laughed at Maura for wanting to keep one, then said she could have both; a photo of Jane, just Jane, walking on a beach and laughing in a blouse and skirt with sandals in hand. Her curls were caught in the wind and her cheeks were pink.

Angela stopped Maura's hand before she could self-consciously turn the page. She was entranced by this rare moment of softness Maura had captured of her daughter. No one else but Maura could have taken that photograph. There were looks those two only shared with each other and everyone knew it.

"She's beautiful," Angela whispered lovingly.

"She hates me," Maura choked back.

Angela shook her head but couldn't think of anything to say in reply. She released Maura's hand and let her turn the page and she watched in fond amusement as Maura's cheeks lit up.

They'd reached Christmas one year later. A kiss under the mistletoe that Frost had captured in two images. First, a kiss on the cheek that was somehow far from chaste. Second, the real deal. Heat flushed through Maura's body at the memory.

_We don't have to._

_It's tradition._

_It's a stupid tradition. …Although if you-_

_-want to?_

_Do you?_

_Shouldn't I?_

_What?_

It had been Maura who captured Jane's lips but Jane had played along. She'd returned a gentle pressure against Maura's mouth and even gone so far as to flick her tongue over the doctor's bottom lip. The photo had been captured at the precise moment that Maura had opened her mouth to Jane and, as she saw it again now with Angela gawping beside her, Maura knew that she wasn't going to be able to brush it off.

Alcohol and festivities aside, Maura had wanted that kiss - wanted it and _loved_ it - and that simple fact showed in every line of her face. If her eyes had been open, it would have shown there too.

In the weeks following that evening, Maura had looked at the photos Frost took many times. She'd studied them, straining to pick up on Jane's micro-expressions and their myriad possible interpretations. But it was so much harder when the face wasn't moving. Or maybe it was just hard because it was _that face_, Jane's face. And she was never sure if she was reaching a conclusion based on the evidence or based on her own desires. Eventually she had stopped looking at it, hiding it away in her scrapbook with all the other shared and stolen moments - as if organising them could help her make sense of them or tidying them away could help her forget them. (It couldn't.)

Maura looked up at Angela guiltily. She knew better than to brush it off. Angela Rizzoli could pick a lie before it ever left your lips and she could pick an evasion just as easily.

"I… still don't know how she felt about that kiss," Maura found herself admitting.

"How did you feel about it?" Angela asked. The softness of her voice was at least somewhat reassuring.

"I didn't know how I should feel," Maura answered, which was true, if not the whole truth. She mightn't have known the _should_ and _shouldn't_ of it, but Maura remembered instant-for-instant how she'd felt when Jane was kissing her.

Blessed. Beloved. Completed.

"Before I met Jane, I'd never really had a best friend," Maura confessed. "In fact, I didn't have many friends at all. There were people I knew, people I dated, people I conferred with... Nobody to call excitedly after a good date had gone home or to commiserate with over a bad one. And I'd never- I'd never cried in front of another person before her."

"Jane told me about how you met, when she was in the Drug Unit," Angela chuckled. "It didn't sound like you started off as friends with her either."

"I didn't think we did," Maura outright laughed. "She stormed off and I ordered my coffee but something made me look back at her. And something made her look back at me too. And we smiled. Then a few weeks later when she was promoted to homicide and we were properly introduced, she smiled at me again - this silly rueful little smile - and said, '_Well, if it isn't Miss Nonfat No-Foam Latte,'_ and I asked her how she was managing the night work and she gave me a nod. It was like the nod of approval or something because we were friends just like that. It was absurd, incredible, for me but it seemed like such an easy thing for her."

"Yes, Jane's always been good at making it _seem_ easy," Angela replied knowingly. "But she's just good at hiding how little she really trusts people. Barry and Korsak worked their way in but you - you just appeared out of nowhere like her missing half. You can know someone your whole life and not have a relationship like you and Jane scraped together in a matter of months."

"Well, a dream like that is bound to end..." Tears filled Maura's voice and she had to fend off another hug. "Angela, I just want you to know that it wasn't just Jane. You and Frankie and Tommy always treated me like family-"

"You _are_ family," Angela growled affectionately. "You know that. Janie does too; she'll come around."

Maura gave a sniff and closed the book on the photographs of herself and Jane. "She's not sorry. And I can't forgive her if she's not. I can't even pretend to."

"She's not sorry she shot your father," Angela agreed carefully. "She's a cop, sweetie. She's gotta believe that she can make a decision like that - make the right decision - on the spot every time. If she gets shaken up about shooting someone who's firing on her, innocent people could get hurt. So she's not sorry she shot Paddy, sweetie. The day she apologises for that will be the day she hands in her badge. But that doesn't mean she doesn't _hate_ herself for hurting you." Giving Maura a little nudge with her shoulder, Angela wheedled a guilty smile out of the doctor. "You know, you never told me how _you_ felt about that kiss at the Christmas party..."

"Happy," Maura said softly and it was so simple, so true, so _Maura_ that Angela couldn't help but pull the doctor into a tight hug. For once Maura couldn't protest. She hugged Angela back so hard it was as though she though she could somehow transmit her feelings from the mother to the daughter.

"Oh, sweetie…" Angela sighed. "You know the reason this hurts so much is that you love her, right?"

"I- I don't know that," Maura answered, sniffing and reaching for a tissue as a way to wheedle her way out of the hug. "Empirically speaking-"

"Trust me on this, Maura," Angela interrupted her. "You've got yourself a broken heart and so does she. _Fix it_." Angela smiled apologetically as her phone began to ring. "Jane was never one for being patient," she explained, giving Maura a final brief squeeze before standing up. "I'd better get what I came for and head back. Thank you for showing me your book. And, ah… Just hold on, sweetie. Things will turn around. You'll see."

Angela was almost out the door before Maura could bring herself to respond. "I hope you're right…"


End file.
